I Want A Cure
by sdbubbles
Summary: "Sugar or shopping; drinking or dropping; the emotional highs; of my life in disguise; there's one thing for sure; I want a cure." Sandra thinks one night...she wants a cure for the way she has come to live.


**A/N: So. Hello again :) I haven't written much for New Tricks - actually, this is the first thing I've really managed to finish in months - but that is my problem. I'm not even sure I like this much, or even if it makes sense, but I figured I'd post it anyway and let you guys be the judge of that.**

**The song is "I Want A Cure" by Rosanne Cash.**

**Sarah x**

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_Distance makes the heart start wondering_  
_Absence makes the anger grow_  
_The world may just be spinning through us_  
_And separation lets it show_

She looks at her reflection in the mirror as she wonders when he last felt loved. When she last felt like someone actually wanted her and wasn't merely putting up with her. She, she realises, has forgotten what it feels like. She has forgotten what it is to be loved and wanted and instead lives her life alone while every man she comes across proves themselves to be a moron.

This is where the anger starts. The anger that she can't let herself go enough to let anyone lover her, and that no-one is brave enough to try whether she likes it or not.

She sees herself walking this Earth in the mirror, everyone she knows watching her leaving her trail of self-destruction behind her. The way it seems to unravel itself before her eyes unnerves her and she takes a slight step back from the mirror as if it was the thing causing the realisations she hated to acknowledge.

She only sees it now because she sees herself from the outside for the very first time. She sees herself in a different light and she doesn't like what she has discovered. She has pretended for years that her solitary life had no faults, but now the huge flaw of it all is right in front of her: the end result. Her.

_I walk away the fear and anger_  
_I'm talking through the tears each day_  
_I push myself to points of danger_  
_But nothing makes it go away_

She walks away from the mirror. It has told her too much and she doesn't want to hear any more from it. She leaves the bathrooms angry with herself. She shouldn't be acknowledging the fear of loneliness she has buried beneath her workload for years. It's there for a reason.

She shouldn't be swallowing back tears as she smiles at her team and asks them for an update on the current, very brutal, murder case. It's only when they talk of the terror the victim must have felt when faced with death that she realises that, when faced with the same, she feels very little. A niggling fear. Not the full blown horror most would.

She thinks to the incident at Pinewood Studios when she had been literally staring down the barrel; very little had gone through her mind apart from strategy and the safety of everyone else. Gerry, she recalled, had caught her when she was forced down to her seat but she remembers feeling...near enough normal.

What is normal for her, though, she is beginning to realise is constant loneliness and anger, and nothing makes it fade.

_I want a cure_  
_A mental, geographical cure_  
_A physical, chemical cure_  
_Sugar or shopping_  
_Drinking or dropping_  
_The emotional highs_  
_Of my life in disguise_  
_There's one thing for sure_  
_I want a cure_

As it is after-hours and they are technically off-duty, one of her team – she doesn't even pay attention to who it is – hands her a glass of wine. She can remember long nights of drinking and falling asleep on the sofa alone; it helps her through absolutely nothing but still she tries it.

She has picked fights with her team, being deliberately infuriating and difficult, in an effort to feel something out of the ordinary. She has yelled at Gerry so loud her throat hurts over things that were silly and should have been insignificant in the hope that it would stir something in her she wasn't already accustomed to. Not that it ever worked.

There is no high and low for her – only monotony. Everyone else sees her laugh and everyone sees her temper bubble over but that is only the surface. That is only what she allows everyone to see. What lies beneath is a constant dull anger, like a bruise she has had too long; she feels the throbbing but she has got used to it and it doesn't particularly bother her anymore.

She just wants a change, she works out as Brian rambles on about computers. She wants to shout in rage and actually mean it rather than use it as a deterrent. She wants to laugh and for it to feel real to her. She wants something that can do that for her.

_Love seems like a fancy theory_  
_Fame a substitute for friends_  
_Those who love me can't get near me_  
_Those who don't are moving in_

She looks around and sees everyone she knows has someone who loves them. Whether it be a wife, a lover, a child or – and only in Gerry's mad, mad world would this seem normal – an ex-wife, they each have someone who loves them. And she has nobody.

Fame and infamy in the police force quickly became her biggest goal when she was younger. Only now does she see it drives everyone out. It doesn't matter if it is out of fear or irritation, that hopeless ambition of hers pushes everyone out. Anyone who is mad and masochistic enough to actually try and love her, which, in recent years, has been almost nobody.

The people in this room with her are all she has, and she puts a barrier between them and herself. It is a pane of glass; they can see her and hear her but they cannot truly feel her. That barrier is currently raised as they continue their discussion.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that people who have claimed to love her, but never really have, always got to her. How they manage it she is yet to work out, but they do. She doesn't really know if it is desperate naivety or if it is true belief in the wrong people, but the fact she can count the number of people who have ever really loved her on one hand and the number who have claimed to is endless...that is rather troubling.

They close in on her, these people, before she can plan an escape. Each person takes a piece of her heart and she never gets that piece, ragged and bleeding, back.

_A heart is like a broken window  
Pain depends on point of view  
The world may just be slowly stopping  
And no one knows but me and you_

She sees her reflection once more, distorted in the wine glass; her heart feels ready to shatter in on itself. So many people have taken a piece of her that she often feels weak as she pretends to the world around her that she is the strongest person anyone will every meet.

In a way, though, she isn't in very much pain. It feels like normality to her. It is her life. It is her lie to tell every day. But when she strips the normality away and she negates the monotony, she finally sees that, yes, she is in agony. She has just gotten used to it so it doesn't really hurt anymore. Like a sprained ankle, if she walks on it enough, it doesn't bother her to slowly amble through life. It is only when she stops that the pain returns.

A voice calls her back to the office and she reminds herself that just because she has stopped, that does not mean the rest of the word has. And if, in that moment, the world had come to a standstill, she would not have noticed or even cared.

Instead she would have been frozen in her own world as she had just been. Only she and the contorted image staring back at her know what she is thinking.

_I want a cure_  
_A mental, geographical cure_  
_A physical, chemical cure_  
_Sugar or shopping_  
_Drinking or dropping_  
_The emotional highs_  
_Of my life in disguise_  
_There's one thing for sure_  
_I want a cure_

She drinks from her glass again and wishes it would actually help. People say drinking helps, even if it is only in the moment and reality is still there when the effects wear off. For her it doesn't even do that anymore. All the vices everyone else has – smoking, chocolate, alcohol, drinking, drugs, shopping, sex – none of it will make her feel anything she isn't feeling already.

If only there was a pill, a therapy, an injection, a vaccine...anything that would cure this barely noticeable dull ache.

Even putting herself in harm's way does very little to her anymore. There was a time she would have been scared out of her wits and actually have to force herself to hold it together, but now she would only be unerringly calm when faced with harm, or even death.

She doesn't really know what has driven her to hide the truth of her life so effectively. She doesn't really care what other people think of her; she learned a long time ago that people will always think what they want and convincing them otherwise is near impossible. She doesn't have a reason but she still makes sure she hides what lies beneath, either behind a smile of laughter or a snarl of fury.

She only knows that she wishes that cure existed, but she is no longer naïve enough to believe in it. There is only one cure: love. And she can't find it, no matter how much she looks.

_Where no-one can see me_  
_No-one knows how I'm feeling_

She hears her name called and smiles up at Brian when asked for her opinion. He sees her through the glass. He hears her through the glass. He just can't feel her, or the air of unhappiness around her because that glass barrier prevents it.

Nobody, not Brian or the rest of her team or even her own mother, can feel that air around her because the barrier is always between her and whoever she is with. Nothing shatters it. Nothing and nobody gets through it so nobody knows how she feels. Not unless she tells them. But where would that leave her? Only in a position of vulnerability she has avoided too long to succumb to.

_I want a cure  
A mental, geographical cure  
A physical, chemical cure  
Sugar or shopping  
Drinking or dropping  
The emotional highs  
Of my life in disguise  
There's one thing for sure  
I want a cure _

She finishes the last of her glass of wine. It doesn't help anything but still, it's worth a shot, right?

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**Hope this is OK!  
****Please feel free to leave a review and tell me what you think!  
****Sarah x**


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